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Joan and Irwin Jacobs donate $100 million, a transformative gift, helping to launch Salk’s five-year, $500M philanthropic and scientific Campaign for the Future.

The Salk Institute is embracing the artificial intelligence revolution and inventing new ways to investigate life. Machine learning, deep learning and other AI techniques are being used to probe massive data sets, identify useful information and make accurate predictions.

Dan Tierney is no stranger to big data. When Tierney founded a financial technology firm in the late 1990s, long before he joined the Salk Institute’s Board of Trustees, he was fascinated by emerging computational approaches that could crunch data and reveal hidden truths.

This year, Staff Scientist Natalie Luhtala celebrates her 10-year work anniversary at the Institute. In her current role, she’s directing a project examining an elusive signaling pathway to identify new targets for treating pancreatic cancer.

Laura Newman, a Salk postdoctoral researcher, fell in love with science in a lab in college and switched from a medical program to pursuing biochemistry and developmental biology. At Salk, her main focus is on how cells can recognize when they’re sick or damaged in order to activate the immune system for cell survival.